


The Numinous Intent

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 16:26:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3616512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Adam and Ronan, fathers and poetry and love are heavy things, made more so by their necessity. But bodies, bodies are simple and can say twice as much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Numinous Intent

The journals live in the corner of Adam’s room, imbuing it with the heavy feeling of Niall Lynch’s spirit. He’s not sure why they’re there instead of at Monmouth. It makes a certain amount of sense for them to not be kept at the Barns, because of the distance and the impracticality of it, but it seems almost as impractical for them to sit apart from the rest of Ronan’s life. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Niall had always held himself apart from his sons and Ronan just wanted to make sure that what was left of him was kept somewhere safe. Safe as life, as Gansey would say.

Adam doesn’t know how to feel about Ronan finding his apartment safe. It’s possible it’s wrapped up in the religion of the place. Adam finds it to be safe, but that’s a different thing entirely, because none of Ronan’s homes have ever been inherently dangerous. His apartment is little more than a tiny, stale exhalation, but it’s an exhalation of relief. A place where he can sleep through the night without worrying about being woken up by drunken slurs and angry hands. A place where he can control who comes and goes and where no one asks him to explain himself.

 _Yes_ , Adam thinks, _safe_. Which is why he feels like he’s trespassing, breaking the sanctity of that promise of safety, when his curiosity finally gets the better of him and he places his hand on top of the pile of journals.

Niall’s journals are mostly practical. Two of them are gleaming books bound in leather that’s soft and shiny from age that might make what’s in them seem weighty by proxy, but the rest are made of cardboard and paper, small enough to fit in a pocket and disposable in the way most people usually are—whole lives quickly captured by time and then set aside.

Adam picks up one of the smaller ones. There’s no date anywhere to indicate when it was written. The first several pages are lists of supplies and costs needed for the cattle in tight, neat print. After that the text is written in sloppy cursive that Adam merely runs his eyes over, not really reading, just getting a feel for the hurried way in which he must have been working to capture whatever was tumbling out of his mind. Words stand out here and there: _sunset, ivy, collapse, home, ocean, breathing_. He takes a moment to construct his own scene with those notes. Maybe Niall returning home after one of his absences and seeing the place with fresh eyes.

Ronan loves Niall in a way that even Adam can feel in the core of him. It aches in them both. In Ronan because he will never have that again and in Adam because he never had it to begin with. Niall had been absent often, but Adam gets the impression that when he was present he was a blinding light. His attention burning through the boys and all of the lessons he insisted they have. He had made sure they learned skills that tied them to him and, as a consequence, the place from which he’d come, though they wouldn’t have known that then.

At one time Adam hadn’t understood how Ronan’s viciousness could have been born in a place as beautiful and breathless as the Barns, but the more he sees of the place and the more he sees of Ronan well, he’s developing an understanding. Ronan had been taught that love was fierce loyalty above all else-loyalty to secrets, loyalty to blood, loyalty to the affinity of emotion-and that anything that threatened that loyalty needed to pay in blood of its own. Or be paid, in the case of Niall’s death.

Adam has lost count of the number of times he’s wished his father dead. It’s something he always feels guilty for afterwards-powerfully so, almost as powerful as the fear that called the thought up in the first place-but he thinks it’s not uncommon for a person who is suffering to wish an end to it by any means possible. And yet, he doesn’t know what he would do if he saw Robert Parrish bloody and gone in their dusty yard. It would probably hurt regardless. Why was it that blood was so important when all it seemed to contain was the pain needed to extract it?

About a quarter of the way through the journal the sprawl of cursive gives way to more tight columns of print, only this time they don’t have anything to do with the farm. The top of one page reads:

_Morning sun pierces eyes_  
_with the sharpness of an arrow,_  
_burning away last night’s lies_  
_where they boil in my marrow._

It quickly devolves into verses that are quite filthy and Adam can feel the heat spreading across his cheeks. He thinks about the things Ronan had said to him several nights previous as they had been spread out naked on Adam’s mattress, exploring the newness of each other. Ronan never rhymed, but there was undoubtedly some small bit of poet left over from Niall in his soul, the way words seemed to fall out of his mouth as if designed to build worlds. Or maybe that’s just what growing up in two worlds with the shared power of a god turns you into. Poetry as a consequence, not a cause.

Adam’s knocked out of his reverie by the sound of a key in his lock. He freezes, pages held open against his knee. He could drop it and scoot away, but there’s no time to be doing anything else and he knows he’ll look even more suspicious than he looks now if he’s just sitting in the middle of his floor. He goes with option two and leans back against the wall. He closes the journal, but keeps a hold of it, clearly visible in his lap. When Ronan enters Adam meets his gaze and tries not to flinch.

“Get bored with the history reading?” he says, his tone frustratingly neutral in comparison to how much trouble Adam feels like he should be in for snooping.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says, because he is. He’s learned a lot about Ronan over the last several weeks, but it has been on Ronan’s own terms as it should be, not via sneaking a look at the prologue.

Ronan shrugs. “If I was worried about you reading them I wouldn’t have left them here. It’s why they’re not at Monmouth.”

“Gansey wouldn’t!” Adam says, feeling some small amount of indignation on Gansey’s behalf. Still, there’s a small boost of pride that comes with knowing that Ronan has shared parts of himself with Adam that not even Gansey knows.

“He wouldn’t,” Ronan agrees. “But if he knew they existed he’d ask me a lot of questions I don’t want to answer. You know how he can’t resist a history.”

Adam does know. Gansey had spent a solid month obsessed with what made Adam Adam, because he was raised so differently from the rest of the Aglionby students. That was before he’d learned about Adam’s father and then spent several days miserably apologizing for being so nosy. The thing is, Adam knows Gansey’s questions wouldn’t have been so indelicate if he’d known it was a difficult situation to begin with, but that didn’t make Adam feel any less like an oddity at the time under Gansey’s curious scrutiny. Gansey’s attention was mostly harmless as long as you knew where you stood.

“I’m not different, I guess,” Adam says. “Picking up terrible habits from the both of you now.”

Ronan lets out a single bark of a laugh and sits down on the other side of the small pile of journals, curling up into the corner of the room as if it’s holding him. There’s just something about Ronan, Adam muses, that makes it seem like places love to have him inhabit them. It’s as if he bends the very reality of them around him. Maybe he is.

“Learn anything interesting?”

“Prurient minds run in the family,” Adam says.

This Ronan laughs at for real. “The poetry is definitely what you get for snooping.”

“We should really consider going to a dirty poetry based deterrent system. Just replace all Beware of Dog signs with a couplet or something.”

“Hm,” Ronan hums lightly. “Muscles ache with want of work, so it’s into your sin I burrow.”

“You’ve been through that one, I see,” Adam says.

“I’ve been through most of them.”

“Have you found what you were looking for?”

Ronan laces his fingers in his lap and looks down at them. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for. I’m just learning, putting the pieces together.” 

“If you could have any answer, what would it be?”

“Mother,” Ronan says. The word seems to stick to the roof of his mouth and need some coaxing to come out. “I guess I want to know if she’s based on a real person. Why she wasn’t a real person. I mean, I seem to remember people really liking him. Surely he didn’t need to make someone up.” 

“Maybe he was afraid,” Adam says.

While love had always been nestled in loyalty for Ronan, it had been wrapped in fear for Adam. Even now, it’s not that he fears Ronan himself, but he’s afraid for their future and their quest. Afraid of what he’ll become if he loses Ronan or manages to push him away. It’s not a far leap for him to imagine Ronan’s father fearing a similar loss, especially with the extra baggage of the fact of him.

“He was afraid of a lot of things, turns out.” Ronan dips his head down to rummage through the pile. He pulls the black leather journal with its cracked spine and gospel gilt page edges off the bottom of the stack and lays it out on his knee. He flips through the pages with familiarity, stopping somewhere in the middle.

Ronan looks up at Adam quickly before turning back to it and starting to read. “Ronan manifested his ability while I was away. Aurora showed me the flowers and I can’t help but note how similar they are to the flowers he’d seen on me that morning. Not exact. Not my flowers, which means that he too has his own land. I wish still, as I did when I was a boy, that dreamers could share their homes. How easy it would be on the young. But also, how hard it would be when the next generations pass on. 

It’s hard enough handling my father’s legacy without his dreams junking up my own. Though that is what fatherhood seems to be regardless of ability. Even mundane fathers fear for their sons. I fear for his burden, for how to explain this, for who it will make him. I fear for Declan, who I was so sure would also be like us, but who so far has shown nothing. What will his monster of a brother become to him?”

Ronan stops and looks up again. The word monster hangs in the air between them.

“He can’t have meant,” Adam says.

“I think I know what he meant,” Ronan replies. There’s no anger in his words. He sounds flat and tired. “Our magic isn’t party magic. You’ve seen me wrecked by the things I’ve dreamt. I’m dangerous. Even more so when I’m lonesome.”

He pauses and Adam doesn’t doubt that they’re both thinking of Matthew.

“People should be afraid of me,” he finishes. “Fear keeps people safe, right?”

“Not always,” Adam says from experience. Then, more lightly, “Maybe we’ll get you one of the poetry warning signs. We can hang it around your neck.”

“I’ll just get it tattooed here,” he says, trailing his finger across his collarbone. “With fingers soft and thorough, welcome you to glistening morn.”

“So crass,” Adam says, but he’s looking at Ronan’s lips as he says it and wishing for a way to do away with words entirely. 

Ronan reads his mind. He closes the journal and lays it on the floor next to his knee, then he leans over the stack with his arm out, beckoning Adam closer. Adam leans in too and their lips meet over the pile, Ronan’s fingers tangling in the too long hairs at the nape of Adam’s neck.

Before this, before Adam had realized that all of Ronan’s seeming uncaring was self-defense and his ire was affection, Adam had always felt at odds with him. All of their conversations had felt like arguments, all of their agreements hard won. There was something about the way the two of them had been taught to speak that wasn’t compatible unless fed through Gansey as a conduit. He wonders if maybe it really is in their upbringing. Ronan raised by a poet and taught to speak in dreams. Adam raised by an asshole and taught to speak in misery.

But it doesn’t matter anymore, because now they have this. As much as Ronan likes to use his words to make Adam blush and squirm, he doesn’t need to. Tongues are always put to better use, Adam feels, when applied to bodies instead of rhetoric.

Adam scooches around the pile, trying not to pull away from Ronan as he crawls. Ronan uncrosses his legs, pulls his knees up and spreads them until Adam can sit himself between them. Adam works his hands up under the hem of Ronan’s shirt and Ronan lifts his arms so Adam can pull it off over his head.

Now that he has the space, Adam tries to use his hands to say what what he doesn’t know how to say with his words. He runs them down Ronan’s chest. _You are powerful._ He traces a light line up Ronan’s arm over his bicep. _You are strong._ He dips his fingers into the waistband of Ronan’s jeans. _You are worthy._ He undoes the button there and unzips Ronan’s fly. _You are not beholden to his fear._ Adam cups Ronan’s already hard cock through his boxer shorts. Ronan groans and brings his hands up to Adam’s shoulders, pushing him away. Adam lets out a disappointed sigh and Ronan laughs against his mouth.

“It’s my turn,” he says. Ronan tilts his head and licks his already wet lips and Adam’s chest tightens with want.

It isn’t actually Ronan’s turn, strictly speaking. Rather, when given the opportunity Ronan will always say it’s his turn. Adam had asked him why, worried that maybe he wasn’t good enough, even though neither of them were all that practiced, both just learning what all of this meant and could mean.

Ronan had huffed and leaned into Adam’s neck and assured him as vividly as he could that no, Adam was good, better than, but that he loved undoing Adam. He loved the taste of his skin and the way his cock fit into his mouth, the small sounds Adam made and the way his breath hitched. Ronan told him that Adam’s pleasure was the most beautiful, desirous thing he’d ever created. And if Adam is honest with himself, Ronan hadn’t even really had to touch him after that, because just the confession had unspooled pleasantly in his gut and set him aching, ready.

Ronan presses his hands against Adam’s shoulders more firmly until Adam is laying himself back and squirming out of his own shirt. Ronan undoes Adam’s jeans and pulls them down with his boxers and suddenly Adam is naked against his cold, hard floor and still burning up.

Ronan crawls up his body and kisses Adam on the lips. Adam grips the sides of Ronan’s chest and tries to pull him down, presses his hips up into Ronan’s where he’s straddling him, runs his fingers down to impatiently push at Ronan’s jeans. He gets them halfway down Ronan’s thighs before Ronan breaks away and sits back to remove the rest of his clothing. Then he leans back over Adam and presses his lips against Adam’s earlobe.

“There, we’re even. Are you happy now?”

“Almost,” Adam says. He can’t believe how rough with need his own voice sounds. He grips the back of Ronan’s neck with one hand and lets the other dance down his chest and stomach until he’s gripping his cock. He strokes Ronan up and down a few times before Ronan lets out a low groan into his mouth. He lightly bites at Adam’s bottom lip before pulling away again.

Ronan sits back on his knees, out of reach of everything but Adam’s thighs and Adam doesn’t mean to let out the disappointed sound, but it happens anyway. Still, he can’t complain about the view. Ronan is spread out over him, feral and tense. His pale skin is stretched over his frame in much the same way the smooth leather is snugly stretched around the pages of Niall’s books, the black ink daggers of his tattoo slipping up over his shoulders and alluding to the stories he contains.

“Hey,” Ronan says.

Adam’s eyes drift back up to meet his gaze. “Yeah?”

“You know I need you, right?”

Whether it’s loyalty or fear, love is heavy for both of them and they both feel wholly unprepared to put that weight on another person or onto something so new. So they make stabs at precision in their language instead. What is love anyway, except another way to need and want?

“I need you too,” Adam says.

Ronan places a hand on Adam’s thigh and uses his thumb to stroke up the underside of Adam’s cock. Adam doesn’t even know where the low keening sound that escapes his lips comes from.

“Yeah?” Ronan says, and before Adam can come up with another answer Ronan is leaning over him and replacing his thumb with his tongue and words fail Adam entirely all over again.

Adam thrusts his knees up around Ronan’s shoulders and his hands scrabble in vain for purchase on his floor as Ronan takes him deep into his mouth and presses his knuckles lightly beneath Adam’s balls. Adam gives up and grips his own thighs tightly with his fingers as every part of him is condensed down to the sensation of Ronan’s mouth and tongue and hands and the light sucking pressure that’s pulling small, quivering moans up Adam’s throat and out of his mouth.

Ronan wraps his fingers around the base of Adam’s cock and uses them in concert with his tongue. He pulls his mouth away and strokes Adam slowly, resting his chin against the inside of Adam’s thigh. It’s a pleasant, sharp pressure in relation to the growing climax just beneath his gut.

“Adam,” Ronan says gently.

Adam presses forward and tilts his head down to look at him, confused. The brightness of Ronan’s eyes and the red heat settled into his cheeks is incongruous with his voice. Adam silently curses him for being so in control. “Yes?” he gasps. 

“I’m going to do something, and if you don’t like it you can tell me to stop, okay?” Ronan is still stroking him steadily. He twists his hand around the head of Adam’s cock quickly before sliding back down.

“God, yes, okay,” Adam says.

Ronan flashes a wicked grin before kissing his way across Adam’s thigh and taking him back into his mouth. He slips one of his hands underneath Adam to cup his ass and Adam drapes his leg over Ronan’s shoulder obligingly, desperately needing to be closer than it’s possible for two different people to be. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but it’s somehow not for Ronan to slowly and gently press a finger up inside of him. It’s a new sensation on top of what was already a lot of sensation and Adam moans loudly, surprising himself. He cants his hips up and Ronan takes it as encouragement to pick up his pace and press in a little further.

It might be the surprise, or it might just be the quiet, intense insistence with which Ronan is working him, but Adam is completely undone. “I’m-” he chokes out, and places his hand on top of Ronan’s head.

Ronan twists the finger he has inside of Adam and curls his tongue tightly around the head of Adam’s cock and Adam feels himself unspool entirely. He rocks his hips harder and Ronan takes it, continues to lightly work him over until Adam can’t move anymore. Adam curls his fingers lazily across the short hairs along the back of Ronan’s head, breathing hard.

Ronan pulls away with his mouth and his hands and Adam suddenly feels cold and empty, remembering his place on the floor. His shoulders ache. When he looks up Ronan is wiping his hands on his t-shirt. He starts to bring it to his mouth but before he can Adam sits up onto his knees and takes it from him. He wraps his arms around Ronan’s shoulders and kisses him deeply, letting his tongue explore Ronan’s tongue and the hollows of his cheeks, every place his cock had already been.

Ronan scoots closer to Adam and his own cock bounces off of Adam’s thigh, hard and slick. Adam wraps his fingers around the base of it and Ronan groans. Adam tries to pull away, to bend down and return the favor, but Ronan snakes an arm around his back and holds him close.

“Please don’t stop kissing me,” he says with now familiar desperation.

“Never,” Adam swears, and presses his lips back to Ronan’s.

Their lips are wet with spit and they’re sloppy, hungry for each other and to be closer and for more, _more_. Adam can feel himself getting hard again as he uses long, fluid strokes on Ronan’s cock, breaking his rhythm every now and again to run his thumb over the slit of its head and soon Ronan is moaning into Adam’s mouth. It’s thrilling and delicious.

When Ronan comes it’s between them. Adam tries to cover it with his hand but it still ends up splattered across their stomachs and thighs. Now Ronan is the one panting but he won’t pull away, won’t stop kissing Adam, like he needs this to breathe. Maybe he does. Adam certainly has his moments where he feels the same.

Ronan’s already soiled shirt is near his calf and he uses it to clean both of them off, laughing lightly against Ronan’s mouth as he thinks about Ronan having to go home the next day in one of his. Adam’s shirts are just a hair too tight on Ronan, which Adam appreciates much more than Ronan does. Adam’s knees are starting to ache against the floor and the muscles of his thighs feel tight enough to snap. He pulls away and Ronan chases his lips.

“Come on,” Adam says. He stands up and holds his hand out.

Ronan takes it and lets Adam pull him to his feet. They stumble over to the mattress, arms still tangled together, fingers searching warm, blushed skin, and collapse onto it. Ronan wraps himself around Adam, scooping him up into his arms and holding him close, draping his leg across Adam’s thighs and hooking his heel behind Adam’s calf. They kiss until their lips go numb and then they just stay as they are. Ronan traces small circles on Adam’s abdomen with his thumb.

“Do you think he would have approved?” Adam asks, unable to stop himself now that his thoughts have returned to their starting point. “Of us I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Ronan says. “Nothing like this ever came up, and he hasn’t written any opinions about it that I’ve found. But it doesn’t matter.” There’s a certainty in his voice that Adam wishes he could steal for his own.

Adam’s entirely comfortable with who he is, but he knows exactly what his father would say and he hopes he never has to talk to the bastard about it. He doesn’t want to turn his assumption into reality and spoil this wonder of a thing they have. And it’s not like Ronan is going to make him. If anyone understands about Adam’s father it’s the boy who fought him. Adam curls his hands up around Ronan’s forearm, holding onto him tightly.

“I guess it doesn’t,” he says.

“You’re not broken,” Ronan says. He presses a kiss to Adam’s jaw. “You’re full of magic.” And the side of Adam’s neck. “And strength of will.” And Adam’s shoulder. “And you’re really hot.” His lips brush the hollow of Adam’s collarbone.

“As long as your priorities are in order,” Adam says, raising his knee and hitching Ronan’s thigh up.

“Funny, I’m sure he’d at least have approved of what a jerk you are.”

“Hey,” Adam says.

“Yeah?” Ronan replies.

“You know I need you right?”

“I do.”

“Good, and if you write any dirty poems about me, for the love of god, don’t just leave them lying around for anyone to find.”

“They’ll be for your ears only,” Ronan says. “Want to hear my first stanza?”

“No,” Adam groans. He places his hand over Ronan’s mouth, but it doesn’t stop him from trying.

**Author's Note:**

> This started out being about feelings and poetry, but then it got away from me. Oops? 
> 
> Yes, I did write Niall's dirty poetry for him. No, it's not good enough to just post the whole of on its own. Rest assured that the rest of it is just as dirty.


End file.
